TY - GEN
T1 - Heterogeneous UPF Integration Framework and 5G User Plane Acceleration
AU - Wang, Tse Han
AU - Hu, Min Chih
AU - Yen, Li Hsing
AU - Tseng, Chien Chao
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright 2023 KICS.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes User Plane Function (UPF) in the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to handle user data between radio access network (RAN) and data network (DN). Since pure software-based UPF does not fulfill the diversified service requirements of 5G networks, researchers have leveraged various hardware acceleration techniques to enhance the performance of UPF. However, different hardware implementations require different installations and adaptations. This paper proposes a framework to integrate various UPF implementations. It is compliant with standard UPF but decouples the control plane function (UPF-CP) from the user plane function (UPF-UP). We implemented UPF-CP by Packet Forwarding Control Protocol (PFCP) Agent with two implementations of UPF-UP: one with Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the other with Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC). We integrated the framework with an open-source 5G core network, free5GC, and evaluated the framework by experiments. The results confirm the interoperability of our work with free5GC and demonstrate the superiority of the hardware-accelerated UPF over pure software approach in terms of packet processing speed on the user plane.
AB - The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes User Plane Function (UPF) in the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to handle user data between radio access network (RAN) and data network (DN). Since pure software-based UPF does not fulfill the diversified service requirements of 5G networks, researchers have leveraged various hardware acceleration techniques to enhance the performance of UPF. However, different hardware implementations require different installations and adaptations. This paper proposes a framework to integrate various UPF implementations. It is compliant with standard UPF but decouples the control plane function (UPF-CP) from the user plane function (UPF-UP). We implemented UPF-CP by Packet Forwarding Control Protocol (PFCP) Agent with two implementations of UPF-UP: one with Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the other with Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC). We integrated the framework with an open-source 5G core network, free5GC, and evaluated the framework by experiments. The results confirm the interoperability of our work with free5GC and demonstrate the superiority of the hardware-accelerated UPF over pure software approach in terms of packet processing speed on the user plane.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85174854749&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85174854749
T3 - APNOMS 2023 - 24th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium: Intelligent Management for Enabling the Digital Transformation
SP - 148
EP - 153
BT - APNOMS 2023 - 24th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 24th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium, APNOMS 2023
Y2 - 6 September 2023 through 8 September 2023
ER -